On your last point, could you elaborate? I have been using Next.js for a long time and I have never once interacted with Vercel. What soft lock-in are you referring to? I often deploy it using OpenNext and SST in AWS.

Curious to how much is just good marketing on their side and how much is maybe features of it I don’t know that are “vercel native”

If you are using OpenNext and SST (or Netlify), then you are doing it right. Most people assume you can just throw a Nextjs project into a docker container and don't realize that there are many features that don't just work "out of the box". The entire OpenNext project exists because of this massive gap

The reason I called it "soft" lock-in is because all of the nextjs features are technically self-hostable but often require extra setup that is sometimes completely undocumented. Until recently, Vercel itself didn't even use the default build outputs. It had an undocumented flag that skipped some serving logic that was handled by the Vercel platform itself.

Dax Raad from SST actually did an interview going more in depth into some of the features that don't exactly work "out of the box" as advertised (PPR, ISR, image optimization). This interview is about a year old and luckily Vercel has been collaborating with OpenNext to resolve a lot of these concerns but its still ridiculous that these were ever issues to begin with

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-w0R-leDMc

This was awesome! Also, I couldn't stop my child brain from anticipating "your mom" at the end.

I think this is the UX challenge of this era. How to design a piece of software that aids in promoting the human-level of attention to a distributed state without causing information loss or cognitive decline over many tasks. I agree that for any larger piece of work with significant scope the overhead of ingesting the context into your brain offsets the time saving costs you get from multitask promises.

My take on this is that the better these things get eventually we will be able to infer and quantify signals that provide high confidence scores for us to conduct a better review that requires a shorter decision path. This is akin to how compilers, parsers, linters, can give you some level of safety without strong guarantees but are often "good enough" to pass a smell test.

I really like this initiative, I think the biggest value here isn't the multiple sessions or worktrees, but an interoperable protocol between these coding agents through a new UX. A sort of parent process orchestrator of the many agents is something I want, is there other tools that do that today? e.g. run Claude, Codex, Gemini, all together and sharing data with one another?

Something like Shrimp is useful for at least coordinating different Claude subagents.

What a fascinating answer, this makes a lot of sense from a chaos theory perspective. Exploiting a hyper developed sense with modern tooling

Very interesting problem to even consider. That said, I don’t think we even understand the what, how, and why of music. The rhythm precognition aspect mentioned in another comment makes me think it’s just a byproduct of time and counting with pattern recognition, not necessarily a music thing just a correlation by virtue of physics and the laws of the universe.

If I stopped and looked at how many redundant apps I have right now that’d be wild. For messaging alone, I’m on iMessage, Messenger, Telegram, Signal, WhatsApp, Slack, Discord, IRC, many in-app DM secondary tier feature chats, and perhaps a few other esoteric ones. Can we go back to just IRC please, those were the days for me.

I miss the days when I could start Pidgin and it'd automatically log into every single service I use, and I could chat with anybody regardless of which service they were on. I didn't need half a dozen different apps running just to chat. It felt like a utopia compared to what we have today.

We're working hard on getting back to that, but it takes time, and we're an unfunded open source project, but soon maybe?

You may be interested in our monthly updates https://discourse.imfreedom.org/tag/state-of-the-bird

This is why we must have open interoperable standards, like the Internet used to and was meant to be.

People tried to standardize on XMPP back in the day, but capitalism figured out that standardize didn't fit their profit motivation. These days XMPP is a bit of an dated XML-heavy protocol, but Matrix is a newer alternative, and it supports bridging.

No profit in allowing people to communicate freely without intermediaries.

How to middle man and gatekeep otherwise?

While I agree with you, there's certainly other ways to make money in an open protocol. Email perhaps is a good example, we are still on SMTP/IMAP and there's lots of business built on custom clients and whatnot. (Ok, maybe not the best example haha but hopefully you get my point here)

Email is a glorious relic from the truly distributed internet that could have been...

That is why its so useful! It was just designed to work not enslave or en-silo.

The opportunities came after the market was created and adoption was wide-spread because it was just so useful.

The security business opportunities exploded once Microsoft got into the market and things like computer viruses spread via email due to their total negligence and enabling ;)

I can still remember nasty things like Lotus notes or ccmail but once email became widespread and the momentum was undeniable they could not give that sh*t away -- they did try that too.

There are definitely ways to make money.

The problem is that you cannot make as much money as you would by gatekeeping, which means billions of dollars of VC money goes to the gatekeeping app that offers its experience for free and no ads, and spends hundreds of million on ads, influencers, and partnerships to promote their offering and kill the open competition.

And once they’re entrenched enough that’s when they turn the screws on the customer.

Unfortunately our antitrust laws didn’t imagine a world where the marginal cost of serving a new customer was close to 0, so offering a product for free in order to kill competition doesn’t really trigger antitrust laws even though it’s the same kind of behavior.

I think the closest we came to something like this was Slack suing MSFT for bundling Teams, and that probably only stood a chance because of Microsoft’s history.

I also have many messaging apps, but they are all different personas of myself, intended for different audiences. I have zero interest in mixing them.

That could still be part of the protocol though, that's the beauty of protocols versus SaaS. Everyone wins, not just the gatekeepers.

In the 90s and early 2000s, my MSN (personal chats with people I knew IRL), Yahoo Chat (chats with people I met in Yahoo Games), ICQ (strangers all over the world) all were different personas and server different purposes.

And yet using those different chat services would have been unimaginable if it wasn’t for Trillian and then later Adium when I moved to a Mac.

Combining them into a single app with a singular UI, the same KB shortcuts, and being able to easily control notifications etc was a game changer.

Cool idea! What I liked the most was the breakdown into categories like “breaking” and “trending” plus the number of sources.

The view showing the flow with a play animation was a nice concept but I couldn’t see much value in it, wondering if you could try to get a more aggregate stats that shows a connection between these different flows, maybe they follow a pattern like ad-based campaigns or publishers who own these domains, which would explain things. Expanding on this idea, could even try and setup different scores and metrics based on major groups and sponsored content versus organic spread.

Glad it wasn’t just me hahaha

First I hear of spec-kit, that looks very promising, I’m interested in trying it. My approach is to combine beads with superpowers skills https://github.com/obra/superpowers I’m wondering how does it compare to this, gonna give it a try, thanks!